The 2008 Campaign - The First Test: Democrats

By MARK LEIBOVICH

Published: January 1, 2008

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTONBEARING POLITICAL SCARS

Perhaps more than any other candidate, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton faces an unusual challenge in her quest for the presidency. After a political lifetime of public battles, suspicions and humiliations, she must prove she is not too hardened to inspire, or too wary to truly lead.

The scar tissue she has accumulated over the years is central to Mrs. Clinton's political identity. She catalogs her wounds with an air of pride and defiance.

''I joke that I have the scars to show from my experiences,'' she said in an interview.

''But you know,'' she said, ''our scars are part of us, and they are a reminder of the experiences we've gone through, and our history. I am constantly making sure that the rhinoceros skin still breathes. And that's a challenge that all of us face. But again, not all of us have to live it out in public.''

Others cast her as someone whose ambitions have led her to become a completely political construct. A popular YouTube parody last year portrayed Mrs. Clinton and her supporters as mechanized drones. Aides often describe her as ''the most famous person nobody knows,'' a conceit that condemns those who have mischaracterized Mrs. Clinton and acknowledges how inscrutable she can be.

Indeed, Mrs. Clinton is guarded by nature, friends say, a fundamentally ''private person'' despite her hyper-public profile. She has always been easier for many people to follow than to know, and people around her tend to speak of her in tones of distant awe, suggesting that they are more acolytes than friends.

MARK LEIBOVICH JOHN EDWARDS

CHANGED FROM '04

John Edwards's experience as a vice-presidential candidate who went down in defeat in 2004 has clearly influenced his current run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Having seen up close the perils of seeming to shift with the wind, he is selling himself as the candidate of ''conviction'' and ''bold ideas'' and trying to portray Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as tacking for political gain. Once the sunny centrist who did not want to criticize his rivals by name, Mr. Edwards has become the most confrontational candidate in the race. And he has courted his party's left wing by renouncing his vote on the Iraq war, something he counseled Senator John Kerry, his running mate in 2004, not to do.

''There's no question John Edwards is different now than he was in 2004,'' said Peter Scher, whom Mr. Kerry recruited to run Mr. Edwards's vice-presidential campaign. ''There's a great deal more confidence in his own instincts and his own judgment.''

Kerry loyalists, meanwhile, seethe as they watch Mr. Edwards's new aggressiveness. Stephanie Cutter, who was Mr. Kerry's communications director, said, ''A lot of what I'm seeing now, I wish I'd seen in 2004.''

Mr. Edwards defends his change in tone, calling it the result of ''a maturing process.''

''I believe that presidential candidates actually have a responsibility to point out substantive differences, to point out perspectives that are different,'' he said in an interview. ''I'm totally comfortable doing it.''

KATE ZERNIKE BARACK OBAMA

'DOSE OF PRACTICALITY'

There was something improbable about the new guy from Chicago via Honolulu and Jakarta, Indonesia, the one with the Harvard law degree and the job teaching constitutional law, turning up in Springfield, Ill., in January 1997 among the housewives, former mayors and soybean farmer in the State Senate.

The new senator, Barack Obama, was a progressive Democrat in a time of tight Republican control. He was a former community organizer in a place where power is held by a few. He was a neophyte promising reform in a culture that a University of Illinois political studies professor describes as ''really tough and, frankly, still quite corrupt.''

''One of my first comments to Barack was, 'What the hell are you doing here?''' said Denny Jacobs, a former senator and self-described ''back-room politician.''

Senator Obama's answer? ''He looked at me sort of strange.''

Mr. Obama did not bring revolution to Springfield in his eight years in the State Senate. But he turned out to be practical and shrewd, a politician capable of playing hardball to win election, a legislator with an eye for an opportunity and a strategist willing to compromise.

By the time he left Springfield in 2004, he had built not only the connections necessary to win election to the United States Senate but a record not inconsistent with his lofty rhetoric of consensus building and bipartisanship.

''He came with a huge dose of practicality,'' said Paul L. Williams, a lobbyist in Springfield and former state representative.

JANNY SCOTT JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

SHAPED BY THE PAST

''Let me tell you a little story,'' Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. told a crowd at the University of Iowa. ''I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected November the 7th. And on Dec. 18 of that year, my wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree.'' A tractor-trailer broadsided their car, killing his wife and daughter and hospitalizing his two sons with what were thought to be ''permanent, fundamental injuries,'' he said.

Mr. Biden has rebuilt his life, but the long-ago accident has become part of the narrative of his campaign and the most horrific of three major crises -- including life-threatening cranial aneurysms in 1988 and the blowup in 1987 of his first presidential race over accusations of plagiarism -- that have created the liberated 65-year-old candidate of today.

Mr. Biden has survived so much personal and political catastrophe that not much about this race seems to get him down. It is the last, great ride of his White House ambitions, and this time, unlike 20 years ago, he seems determined to make it right.

ELISABETH BUMILLER

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD

REDEMPTION CAMPAIGN

On June 23, 1967, Senator Thomas J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, was censured by the United States Senate for diverting $116,000 in campaign funds for his personal use.

Christopher Dodd, the fifth of Thomas Dodd's six children, was a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in a rural village in the Dominican Republic at the time. He first learned of the censure when he read about it in Spanish in a local newspaper. He knew few details. ''I suppose they were trying to insulate me,'' Mr. Dodd said.

Forty years later, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, is running for president. His campaign is about ending the Iraq war, restoring rights to detainees and promising financial security to the nation's retirees. But on a deeper level, his campaign is the most public chapter in his quest for his father's redemption.

ELISABETH BUMILLER

BILL RICHARDSON

FREESTYLE DIPLOMAT

A kind of at-large dealmaker, Bill Richardson does not specialize in any one region of the world, and he has no landmark achievement -- no Dayton Accords or Middle East breakthrough -- to his name. He is not associated with one school of foreign policy thinking or set of positions.

Instead, Mr. Richardson, now the governor of New Mexico, practices diplomacy as contact sport, whizzing from country to country, conflict to conflict, and charming, insulting, even touching his way through negotiations.

''He's convinced that through his own force of personality things will come around,'' said Karl F. Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state.

JODI KANTOR

Photo: The Democratic field in the 2008 presidential race took to the debate stage in July. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSH HANER/THE NEW YORK TIMES)